Giant efficiency enhancement of biomedical imaging scintillation materials using bio inspired integrated nanostructures

Abstract

Biomedical imaging has become one of the most relied-upon tools in health-care for diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. The evolution of medical imaging from plain radiography (radioisotope imaging), to x-ray imaging, to computer-assisted tomography (CAT scans), to ultrasound imaging, and to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has led to revolutionary improvements in the quality of healthcare available today to our society. In order to develop novel imaging techniques for early detection, screening, diagnosis, and image-guided treatment of life-threatening diseases and cancer, there is a clear need for extending imaging to much higher resolution level, information at fine resolution levels can lead to the detection of the early stages of the formation of a disease or cancer or early molecular changes during intervention or therapy. Radiation detection has an important position in medical imaging. Compared to semiconductor detectors, radiation detector and gas proportional scintillation detectors have obvious advantages in the high-energy particles detection, mainly because scintillation detector has high stopping power for the high-energy radiation [1]. Scintillator material in the scintillation detector is the core part of the detector for detection purpose. High-energy particles or rays are absorbed by the scintillator materials in the detector, which emits pulsed light; this pulse of light is generally in the visible region or near UV region. These flashes of light were converted to electrical signals by optoelectronic converter (such as photomultiplier tubes and avalanche photodiodes etc.) in order to achieve high-energy particles or radiation detection. Scintillation detector for radiation detection is usually required to achieve energy resolution, time resolution and position resolution, which means the scintillator materials, must meet certain requirements. An ideal scintillator should have the following characteristics: high light yield, fast decay time, high density, and emission spectra consistent with the photodetector response, stable physical and chemical properties, high radiation hardness and low cost [2].